There's one thing that increases developer productivity like nothing else.

After learning to think like a programmer and a bit of knowledge with regards to data structures and algorithms, there is one thing that will up your game.

Choosing a good productive code editor.

Make coding fast

A good code editor makes writing code fast.

You can save so many keystrokes with a good autocomplete. This autocomplete can be for brackets and quotes, but even function signatures, docstrings, and classes is such a delight.

Every language has boilerplate and an editor should help.

Make coding easy

Focus on the program logic, get help for everything else.

Good editors make use of available documentation and expose it to the programmer when required. This can display available method and attributes, but also show what inputs a function expects.

Coding doesn't have to be hard.

Make coding seamless

Teams often have different conventions and expectations for their code.

A good code editor can help with the formatting of your scripts. Analyze code for semantic errors with a linter and enforce standards that would otherwise come up in code review.

Ideally it gives you easy ways to spot and fix these errors and write better code.

Make coding error-free

Automation is great, but some errors aren't caught automatically.

A good code editor makes debugging easy with breakpoints and variable inspection. Furthermore, it makes writing and running tests against the code automatic or easy.

I love good tooling. Personally, I use VS Code. Which one do you use?

This atomic essay was part of the October 2021 #Ship30for30 cohort. A 30-day daily writing challenge by Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole. Want to join the challenge?